This is brilliantly worked out in detail. The result is not a positive, but a negative Hegelian theology. Religion is not concerned with supra‐ mundane beings and a divinely glorious future, but with present spiritual realities which appear as “moments” in the eternal being and becoming of Absolute Spirit. At the end of the second volume, where battle is joined on the issue of personal immortality, all these ideas play their part in the struggle. Personal immortality is finally rejected in every form, for the critical reasons which Strauss had already set forth in the letters of 1832. Immortality is not something which stretches out into the future, but simply and solely the present quality of the spirit, its inner universality, its power of rising above everything finite to the Idea. Here the thought of Hegel coincides with that of Schleiermacher. “The saying of Schleiermacher, ‘In the midst of finitude to be one with the Infinite, and to be eternal in a moment,’ is all that modern thought can say about immortality.” But neither Schleiermacher nor Hegel was willing to draw the natural inferences from their ultimate position, or at least they did not give them any prominence. It is not the application of the mythological explanation to the Gospel history which irrevocably divides Strauss from the theologians, but the question of personal immortality. It would be well for them if they had only to deal with the Strauss of the Life of Jesus, and not with the thinker who posed this question with inexorable trenchancy. They might then face the future more calmly, relieved of the anxiety lest once more Hegel and Schleiermacher might rise up in some pious but critical spirit, not to speak smooth things, but to ask the ultimate questions, and might force theology to fight its battle with Strauss all over again. At the very time when Strauss was beginning to breathe freely once more, had turned his back upon all attempts at compromise, and reconciled himself to giving up teaching; and when, after settling his father’s affairs, he had the certainty of being secure against penury; at that very time he sowed for himself the seeds of a new, immitigable suffering by his marriage with Agnese Schebest, the famous singer. They were not made for one another. He could not look to her for any sympathy with his plans, and she on her part was repelled by the pedantry of his disposition. Housekeeping difficulties and the trials of a limited income added another element of discord. They removed to Sontheim near Heilbronn with the idea of learning to adapt themselves to one another far from the distractions of the town; but that did not better matters. They lived apart for a time, and after some years they procured a divorce, custody of the children being assigned to the father. The lady took up her residence in Stuttgart, and Strauss paid her an allowance up to her death in 1870.